Futurism and technological ruins

Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria in collaboration with OMA has designed the Miu Miu Spring Summer 2024 showroom at Auguste Perret’s Palais d’Iena in Paris. The space is a landscape of technological ruins. Interspersed between the tall metal columns of the exhibition space were several digital screens displaying artist’s latest artwork. Before the show, the screens displayed an evocative sky filled with clouds, giving the impression of an impending storm. During the show, the images on the screens changed to show a female protagonist wielding a samurai sword and futuristic depictions of the Palais’ columns. Al-Maria’s cinematic story Gravity & Grace explores the conflict between jester and king from different perspectives.

The partnership between Al-Maria and Miu Miu was made possible by the artist’s work The Future Was Desert, that was a part of the 2023 exhibition Everybody Talks About the Weather at Fondazione Prada’s Venice. Al-Maria creates a series of delirious, post-apocalyptic dreamscapes in which past and future appear as arbitrary temporal references within a complex geopolitical landscape.

Sophia Al-Maria’s multidisciplinary art practice draws inspiration from a wide range of sources. These include pop culture, Arabic poetry, science fiction and her own encounters with pollution and climate change. Using media such as film and narrative text, Al-Maria creates compelling stories that serve as a means of expressing her thoughts and emotions about the future, particularly in the context of the current environmental crisis and threat of extinction. For example, during her first solo exhibition in the United States at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the artist introduced the concept of Gulf Futurism to capture the region’s remarkable urban and economic progress in recent decades, while also highlighting the environmental consequences, religious conservatism and erasure of history that have accompanied this development.

Featured image courtesy of MIU MIU